By karenmmartin on situated

(Well, what’s the point of having a blog if you don’t do some shameless self-promotion every now and again?)

Following on from Why Wait? and Betwixt we are organising the third in our series of workshops on ‘in-between-ness’. It is on the subject of public toilets and will take place at the Waag Society in Amsterdam this October 26 / 27.

All the information is at www.inbetweeness.org/apublicinconvenience

This time, Arianna, Johanna and I are also collaborating with Valentina Nisi and Martine Posthuma de Boer of Fattoria Mediale. It will be fun! Go, submit!

A PUBLIC INCONVENIENCE

Technologies designed for the city often try to abstract away from the inconvenient necessities which our bodies require; or, when they are designed explicitly for public toilets, the focus is on supporting the cultural values of hygiene and privacy. What do we miss by ignoring the fact that public toilets are also the site for a variety of social practices?

‘A Public Inconvenience’ will explore the experience and affect of public toilets in an urban environment, in this case Amsterdam. Through observation and engagement we will consider how public toilets are shaped by, and themselves shape, cultural practices, values, and attitudes. And further, how this essential part of the urban fabric contributes to the everyday experience we have of our cities.

‘A Public Inconvenience’ is the third in a series of workshops exploring in-between-ness in urban environments. We define in-between-ness as the places and times that are often on the periphery of everyday life – the journey to work or the time spent queuing in a shop.

As in the other workshops, the intention of ‘A Public Inconvenience’ is not to produce implementable designs for public toilets. Instead we prefer to make speculative and exploratory design scenarios that might act as future inspiration or critique for us as urban technology designers and bring together a group of people around a common interest in ‘in-between’ spaces to support further investigation and collaboration on the topic. By focusing on the experience of public toilets we hope to extend designers thinking of urban lifestyles beyond current categorisations of space and activities.

A double toilet found in a pub in South London. But why?

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* Posted on: Thu, Aug 30 2007 2:37 PM
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By karenmmartin on architecture

I decided to visit the current exhibition at the RIBA in London,  ’Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City’, after reading this review on City of Sound. To be honest, I was curious how an architecture institution would approach curating an exhibition of an entire city with all the intricacies and inter-twining of social, political, spatial, historical, infrastructural and economic contexts that that implies.

The short answer is that they didn’t really engage with these questions. They ignored most contextual factors to concentrate on the celebration of Asmara’s (quite stunning) modernist architecture.

It is a fascinating history, with a fascinating architectural (and, I suspect, social) legacy. Asmara is the capital city of Eritrea on the East Coast of Africa. In its unsettled past, Eritrea has been subsumed as a province of Ethiopia and occupied by Italy from 1889. It was liberated by Britain in 1941, who then remained in the country for the next 20 years until Eritrea won independence in the 1960’s.

The exhibition focuses on the many modernist buildings including service stations, hotels and cinemas, that were built during the 1920’s and 30’s under Italian rule. These are shown through a series of models (reconstructions rather than original), drawings (printed directly onto the exhibition boards) and photographs.

Alongside this there is a display of stories and drawings by inhabitants of Asmara on their favourite building in the city. And an LCD screen shows an excellent (from the section I saw) documentary about the role that these European-style buildings play in the life of the city and its inhabitants.

However, what was missing, in my opinion, was any engagement with questions of how this architecture was integrated into the existing city. We get a glimpse of this during the documentary when a man describes how access to the new, modernist buildings was strictly limited to Europeans, but surely there is more to tell? What about the relationship between the vernacular architecture and the modernist? Was there ever a time when they began to inform each other? Eritrean homes taking on modernist design features – and vice versa. And what about the social implications of these buildings. A few weeks ago someone was telling me how the layout of the family compounds in Nigeria reflect the social structures of the family. Just as the social structures of Western Europe can be found reflected in its own domestic and civic buildings. What happens when one type of architecture is placed onto another type of social structure? Do social structures change, or is the architecture adapted to fit?

It was also interesting that while there were many ways in which individual buildings of the city were represented, when it came to representations of the city as a whole, the only forms used were street plans and aerial photographs. Of course, the layout of the streets is important, and possibly the most visible form of a city’s structure, but there are many other man-made, city-wide layers that can help build up a more complete image. For example, awareness of the sounds of a city, it’s smell, its taste, the movement of its inhabitants, its infrastructures and their representations all add to our understanding of the city as a system made up out of inter-connected elements.

I’m now extremely curious to see the Global Cities exhibition at the Tate Modern to see how these questions have been dealt with there.

‘Asmara:Africa’s Secret Modernist City’ is on at the RIBA, 66 Portland Place, London until the 18th August.

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* Posted on: Thu, Aug 16 2007 10:53 AM
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By karenmmartin on situated

Today, I continue the series of posts about Where the Action Is by Paul Dourish and look at the methods used in Social Computing and the implications of this for the evaluation of projects. Bet you can’t wait..

Last time on Mr. Watson social computing was defined as an approach to technology design that “attempts to incorporate understandings of the social world into interactive systems.” This has huge implications for the design of interactive systems. Paul Dourish writes that ”Advocates for socially based studies of work have found that ethnographic approaches can be used to uncover requirements for a system design through the detailed observation of the working setting. In contrast, more traditional approaches – based perhaps on functional specifications or on laboratory-based usability studies – tend to be disconnected from the lived detail of the work.” [p62]

Eniac Computer; From www.computermuseum.li,

Ethnography

Ethnographic methods are used by various strands of the social sciences including cultural and social anthropologists, and urban sociologists. Ethnography, according to Wikipedia,   “provides an account of a particular culture, society, or community. The fieldwork usually involves spending a year or more in another society, living with the local people and learning about their ways of life. Ethnographers are participant observers. They take part in events they study because it helps with understanding local behavior and thought.” This approach is founded on the idea that a system’s properties cannot necessarily be understood when studied independently of each other. The most common ethnographic techniques are participant observation and interviews and on completion of this fieldwork, the ethnographer will use the collected information to interpret cultural diversity in the group studied.

Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology is a branch of ethnography that originated with the work of Harold Garfinkel (Studies in Ethnomethodology. 1967). Dourish summarises ethnomethodology as the “study of commonsense methods by which people manage and organize their everyday behaviour.” [p74]

Ethnomethodology has a subtle but important distinction from other ethnographic methodologies. While some approaches to ethnography take the view that the social theories explaining the actions of individuals in society are invisible to the very individuals taking the action that gives rise to the theory (de Certeau’s view of the impossibility of understanding a city by being in it?), ethnomethodology says that people not only have their reasons for acting the way that they do, but that they also have an understanding of these reasons. In other words, “in the course of everyday life, everyone, always, is engaged in “practical sociological reasoning,” when, as part and parcel of what they do, they have to figure out what other people mean and in turn figure out how to act themselves in order to get things done.” [p75]

What this means (the other important thing about ethnomethodology) is that “the knowledge that people bring to bear in carrying out this practical sociological reasoning is no less valid than the theoretical models that professional sociologists might offer when they try to figure out what “society does.” We are all ethnographers, woohoo!

Technomethodology

Paul Dourish and Graham Button use the term ‘Technomethodology’ to describe their approach to system design. They wanted to offer a model for development that reconciles human action and motivation (as recognised by ethnomethodology) with the technical processes found in conventional system design. The problem as they saw it was “that there are a number of systematic ways in which conventional system design undermines or removes the resources upon which human interactional behaviour is based” and one solution might be ”to address the problems in an equally systematic way, considering not just this design or that design but the basic models around which those designs are built.” They were also concerned to do this “in a way that preserves the distinctive character of ethnomethodological reasoning, rather than simply the ethnographical observations of particular working settings.” This approach argues that the relationship between technical design and social understandings should be made “at a foundational level, one that attempts to take sociological insights into the heart of the process and fabric of design.” [p87]

Univac-1; From www.computermuseum.li, Photo Courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library and UNISYS

The two areas they focus on are accountability and abstraction. These two areas already feature in the design and development process of interactive systems, but as properties of a system have become isolated then this has led to various problems in considering, and developing and evaluating, a system in its entirety.

Dourish and Button define accountability as being the ability to make an action understandable to others and in particular that the “methods of understanding and making sense of action and the methods for engaging in it are the same methods.” The difficulty in incorporating this into system design is that “Users may have different goals in mind, different reasons for using the system and different ways in which they want to use it. In just the same way as they approach all other activities, they need to be able to decide what to do in order to get things done.” Dourish and Button believe that “In everyday interaction, as we have seen, ethnomethodology argues that accountability is the key feature that enables them to do this” that is “accountability lies in the reciprocality of action and understanding.” [p79] The benefit of achieving this is that interactive systems and technologies become more in tune with existing uses, behaviours and desires and more adaptable to future changes in behaviour and context.

Abstraction, for Dourish and Button is understood as hiding of the details of implementation.  This is a fundamental concept of system design and does have benefits; “Hiding the implementation and dealing with something in terms of its abstraction allows us to isolate one piece of a system from all the rest, and so to adopt a modular approach to design that sees the system as an assembly of interoperating components, with all the advantages alluded to earlier.” [p82] However, it also results in an incompatibility with designing for accountability;  ”The way that activities are organized makes their nature available to others; they can be seen and inspected, observed and reported. But this feature – the way that actions are organized – is exactly what is hidden by software abstractions.” [p83]

Process and Practice

Ethnographic methods offer HCI a way to distinguish between process and practice. The distinction between these can be seen by looking at the work environment where “processes are the formalized or regularized procedures by which work is conducted; procedures for authorizing payments, for ordering supplies, for repairing machines, or whatever. Work processes are captured and codified in rulebooks, manuals, recipes, and similar artifacts.” and practice is ”the informal but nonetheless routine mechanisms by which these processes are put into practice and managed in the face of everyday contingencies. Work practice is frequently informal and seemingly innocuous, but often provides the lubrication that prevents formalized processes from seizing up.” [p62-3]

Practice develops in response to process and is essential for the purposes of ‘getting things done’. No amount of technology can replace the ‘approximation, invention, improvisation, and ad-hoc-ery‘ of practice. “Practice is always dynamic, arising as a way to mediate between processes and the circumstances in which they are enacted. The reason to study practice is to understand how this dynamic mediation takes place.” This is especially and increasingly important in the design of interactive systems when the setting and use of the system cannot be predicted by the designer beforehand. [I have a paper by Mark Burry on his work with the Segrada Familia which is relevant here. I’ll write about it soon]

Evaluation

The same disconnection from the direct engagement and experience of people which can be seen in the design of interactive systems, turns up again when considering the evaluation of these technologies, “Usability evaluations are generally concerned with the detail of interactional features of software systems, are carried out in laboratories in controlled conditions, and measure performance on artificial tasks across a range of subjects; … From an ethnographic perspective, these sorts of questions are meaningless when decontextualized and examined in the sterile confines of a laboratory.” [p62] as Dourish concludes, “the only way to come to a good understanding of the effectiveness of a software system is to understand how it features as part and parcel of a set of working practices, as embodied by a group of people actually using the system to do real work in real working settings.”

Fig. 1. HCI Test Station; Fig. 2. HCI Test Subject

Obviously this critique can be extended to projects that explore topics other than work, and six years later it seems to be causing real problems and great discussion within certain fields of HCI judging by the number of papers at CHI this year dealing with the subject of design or evaluation of ubiquitous, and in particular urban, computing technologies.

Implications for Design

Since the publication of Where the Action Is, user-centred and participatory design techniques have become more common in the design of interactive systems, however I wonder how far designers who use these techniques consider the context within which they are carried out. Taking the ethnomethodological approach, it seems that the context in which the design is carried out will effect the final outcome. For example, the location, tools and skills of a design team would influence the range of systems that it is possible for a particular design team to envision.

I’m not sure how much work has been done in this area but the first half of Hillier and Newman’s paper ‘How is Design Possible?’ seems relevant.

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* Posted on: Mon, Aug 13 2007 10:54 AM
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